Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Republicans Gain, a Nation Enchained

I attended an Ulster County Republican Party party at Fred's Place, a restaurant in Lake Katrine, New York. Fred's Place wasn't serving dinner so Mike and Mark Marnell and I had dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant, Reginato's, also in Lake Katrine. The food and service at Reginato's were good.

The same cannot be said for Ulster County's election results. My candidates all lost, starting with Carl on down. George Phillips, the 22nd New York congressional district candidate has lost by 53% to 47%, according to Nasdaq.com. The only exception was incumbent State Senator John Bonacic. There is little to be said about New Yorkers' choices beyond that I am a stranger in a strange land and have been for many years. In my early twenties I joined the Libertarian Party. When Reagan was elected in 1980 I was 26 and thought that although Reagan was not enough, the country had gone on the right course. Reagan failed to overcome the Democrats sufficiently to actually cut government. When he retired in 1988 we were saddled with George H. Bush.

At the national level, the public did not realize that Bush was a major step away from Reagan's limited government philosophy. H. Bush served only one term, recall, and then Clinton found that he could survive only by adopting the Reagan approach. To my mind that had settled the debate more profoundly than Reagan's election. Unfortunately, the Clinton years' limited monetary expansion (especially from the mid 1990s to 2000) did not reflect a step away from Federal Reserve Bank socialism. Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, the W. Bush and the Obama administrations renewed and then accelerated the monetary growth trend from 1975 to 1995. In effect, the Clinton administration had only offered a breather from the long term inflationary policies of both parties.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Clinton's adoption of more conservative economic policies did not reflect a Reagan victory. Rather, it facilitated the Republicans' rejection of economic conservatism by cloaking their rejection in complaints about Clinton's sexual perversions. Nothing should have made social democrats happier than the Republicans' moronic Clinton impeachment. Rather than attempt to shore up the monetary conservatism of the Clinton years, the Republicans preferred to repudiate economic conservatism under W. Bush.

A similar phenomenon occurred in New York. George Elmer Pataki was elected as an economic conservative in reaction to Mario Cuomo's profligate policies. He found it politically and probably economically advantageous (to himself and Alfonse D'Amato) to repudiate his own economic conservatism in favor of cooperation with New York's destructive public sector labor unions. By the time Pataki left office New York's government had grown to unprecedented proportions.

There has been a major exodus from the state since 2000. Many of those leaving have been retirees; most of the rest have been entrepreneurs, private sector workers who cannot find jobs, and those with energy who have sought opportunity elsewhere. New York has largely become a state of those on three doles: the welfare dole; the government employment dole; and the Federal Reserve Bank dole. Productive work is scarcely known in New York. Even our Tea Party-style gubernatorial candidate, Carl Paladino, made his fortune in real estate and law, not in the kind of productive activity that made the nation great. Not that real estate and stock speculation as well as law don't go back to the days of George Washington, but rather the 19th century saw the growth of an alternative to Whig-style asset manipulation, the development of technology in manufacturing, new methods, and new approaches to business that were only made possible by laissez-faire capitalism. The return to Whig economics reflected in "Progressivism" meant a discarding of laissez-faire in favor of the state-dominated system of asset manipulation favored by Hamilton. Progressivism's end result is now evident: the stagnation of wages and technological innovation, especially in manufacturing, in favor of a two-tiered economy based on privilege and access to the money that the Fed prints.

Many Americans reject the two-tiered economy that Progressivism has created. But not in New York. As a result, this evening at Fred's Place was rather sad. Except for incumbent Bonacic, all of our important candidates lost, to include George Phillips, Pete Rooney, Fawn Tantillo, George Goodwin and Carl Paladino. This is perhaps not surprising since New York in general and Ulster County in particular are in decline and are places that depend once and for all on political theft and manipulation. New York's chief industry, Wall Street, is not productive and cannot exist without taxpayer subsidy. In this, Wall Street is very much equal to most of New York. New York is a state of leeches, parasites and a few suckers who hold on against common sense.

The nation as a whole has sent air-headed millionairess Speaker of the House, Mrs. Paul Pelosi and her left-wing senatorial colleague Russ Feingold, packing. Although I wouldn't go so far to say that Mrs. Pelosi got her job through affirmative action as there have undoubtedly been previous mental deficients in the role of Speaker, it is hard to believe that Mrs. Pelosi would have achieved her job without her millionaire husband or her gender. Her ascendancy to Speaker marks a low point in American government and is part of a general decline of the competence and standards of American government. Ms. Pelosi is a function of a federal government that has failed and needs to be downsized and reconstructed.

Although America has repudiated the Democratic majority by an unprecedented margin (the House Republicans gained about 65 seats including several important victories; although the Democrats retain control of the Senate, the margin is slim and there were many notable successes, especially Rand Paul and Marco Rubio), what is true of New York is true to a lesser degree of the United States.

For a nation to subsidize Wall Street and New York it can no longer be a free nation. Rather, Americans are convinced that a Federal Reserve Bank system that transfers tens of billions of the public's dollars each year to Wall Street and the commercial banking system is somehow necessary to their economic health; and that a government that controls their lives to an unprecedented degree and that wastes incalculable amounts of money, subsidizes the wealthy at the expense of the average American and engages in tyranny and violence is somehow desirable.

I turned on Fox News for the first time since the last election. Suffice it to say that the stupidity of the announcers of Fox reflects the American standard. A people gets the media it deserves.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.